Civil rights still count

Published
4:00 am PDT, Thursday, June 13, 2002

THE $4.4 MILLION in civil damages awarded by a federal-court jury in the Earth First car-bomb case reminds law enforcement advocates that Americans are not panicked by the threat of terrorism into abandoning their civil rights.

The lawsuit was won by the estate of anti-logging activist Judi Bari, and by Darryl Cherney, both injured when a bomb exploded in her car in 1990. The jurors in Oakland found that three FBI agents and three police investigators violated the bomb victims' civil rights. Bari and Cherney were arrested on explosives charges but freed for lack of evidence. They claimed to be targets of an assassination attempt that authorities failed to investigate.

The long-pending lawsuit, surviving Bari's death from cancer in 1997, ended in the shadow of Sept. 11. A trial date of last Oct. 1 was changed as plaintiffs' lawyers worried that no jury in that atmosphere would rule against authorities. During trial, a federal attorney pointedly praised the FBI defendants as "dedicated public servants whose job was to protect us from terrorism."

The jurors, to their credit, focused on how the federal and local cops had treated the rights of Bari and Cherney. The overzealous pursuit of the two was unacceptable -- and unconstitutional -- regardless of what one thinks of the activists' politics or personalities.